ScandoCrime, murder, art direction and scandavian interiors porn

Like many in the UK I’m hooked on Nordic crime dramas on the TV. The Killing, Arne Dahl, Wallander, Beck and best of all The Bridge. The plots are great, the acting is amazing and it’s pretty much always difficult to work out who did it before close to the end. But along with the plots and the acting is the design, both the production design in the way they’re shot and, of course, those interiors. Almost nobody in a ScandoCrime drama seems to live in a house or apartment I don’t want!

To take those in order, the production design is always wonderful, The Bridge has a great colour sense, muted palet pretty much throughout with Saga’s car and coat sometimes the only splash of colour in the shot. Okay, with something as magnificent as the Oresund Bridge to keep using as the backdrop the visuals were always going to be something special though. There is also great use of the rural locations, either eerie empty birchwoods with treetrunks as far as the eye can see or vast open expanses of farmland or moor with nothing between you and the mountains on the horizon.

(image from https://burntretina.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/the-bridge-is-not-a-documentary/)

They also all seem to have wonderful kitchens, none of the pokey ‘ready-meal focussed’ kitchens of most UK detectives but airey open expanses of blonde wood and shiney worktops. Generally these lead through into living rooms full of bare floors, stylish furnishings and a feeling that somebody cared about how they looked. Well, okay, the production designer did care about how they looked but you get the feeling the characters do to. It’s all about light and space, big windows letting the clear norther light stream into the rooms: okay so there’s probably a nasty psychopath out there looking in through the windows but if I had that house there wouldn’t be, alright? Even Beck, who lives alone in a city centre flat (and has strange oblique converstations with the old boy on the balcony next door) manages to have a living room you’d be happy to come home. And as for that amazing house with the long lounge/diningroom/kitchen Wallander has with huge windows looking out across the fjiord…